As of Apr 12, I noticed 4 apps running at the bottom of my applications list in my iMac's Dock that all have Terminal "exec" icons. Hovering over them, all 4 are labelled "setigraphics_8.03_x86_64-apple-darwin". There's no option to quit any of them, only force quit which does nothing. The contextual menu displays "Application not responding". I can't drag them out of the Dock either and none of them shows up in Activity Monitor.

A Unix Executable File with the name "setigraphics_8.03_x86_64-apple-darwin" is in User > Library > Application Support > BOINC Data > Projects > setiathome.berkeley.edu. I did not run this file on my own and am not sure why it's appearing as 4 separate non-responsive apps in my Dock. I searched the forums for this but found no threads.

On my 27" iMac (mid-2011 2.7 GHz core i5) under MacOS 10.10.5 Yosemite, I believe I was running BOINC version 7.6.22 but just updated to 7.6.34. Running it after the install didn't halt those Unix files from running.

The unresponsive scripts forced me to do a hard reboot, the restart would hang. After booting up, none of the Unix files appeared in my doc. However, not long afterwards, I noticed 2 of them in my Dock since screensaver had been running. Hours later, there were 4 again.

As of last night, I left my Mac running and the SETI screensaver was going. I returned home to find 10 (count 'em, 10) unresponsive Unix files at the bottom of my Dock. I switched to another screensaver overnight and found the number remained at 10 this morning.

Any idea what's causing this?

I've posted an update in your thread on the BOINC forums. Sorry again for the bad news.

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Thanks!

In case this is helpful to someone else, the issue I described is no longer happening since upgrading from Mavericks to Sierra 10.12.5. Possibly related to running the latest BOINC 7.6.34 under the most recent version of Mavericks only?